Yukiko bites down on the corner of her lip, half-amused, half-curious. When she turns from me, I dare a glance at Elian. There is a dangerous corner to his smile, and I count the seconds while he looks at me. Green piercing through the new white of the world. Until, finally, Kye clasps Elian’s shoulder and pushes him onward.
When night falls, we set up camp on the flattest part of the mountain. Tents stapled into the ground circle a quickfire station. We crowd around it and cook what sparse remnants of food we have left. The cold seems worse when we sit still, so we hover our hands over the fire so closely that we risk getting burnt.
The wind wails harder, and the crew warms their throats with the rum Madrid brought in place of more food. When night deepens and the crew’s laughter fades to heavy breathing, I listen to the sound of the wind, knowing I won’t be able to sleep. Not with the Second Eye of Keto so close. My mission to overthrow my mother and Elian’s fate threaten to intertwine, and I can’t close my eyes without thinking about how this war will end.
After a while, the snow begins to fall more softly against the tent, and in the dying wind I make out a pair of soft footsteps approaching. I hear them before I see the shadow, drawn on the shelter by the fading glow of my lantern.
When the door unzips, I’m not at all surprised to see Elian crouching beside it.
“Come with me,” he says, and so I do.
I’VE NEVER SEEN THE stars. Not the way Elian has. There are so many things I haven’t done. Experiences Elian seems to have that nobody else, especially me, could dream of. The stars are one of them. They’re Elian’s in a way that they’re no one else’s.
Elian doesn’t just look at the stars, but he imagines them too. He draws pictures of them in his mind, creating stories about gods and wars and the souls of explorers. He thinks about where his soul will go when he dies and if he will become part of the night.
All of this he tells me at the height of the Cloud Mountain, with the moon and the wind and the empty space of the world before us. The crew is sleeping, along with the Págese princess. It feels like the entire world is asleep. And us – just us – we are finally awake.
“I’ve never shown this to anybody,” Elian says.
He doesn’t mean the stars, but the way he sees them. They are his secret just like the ocean is mine, and when he speaks of them, his smile is as bright as they are. I wonder if I’ve ever had that look. If it glittered in my eyes when I thought of home, washing over me like a wave and transforming me as I was so easily transformed before.
“I think there are a lot of things you haven’t shown anybody.”
We don’t talk about Yukiko, or the marriage that seems as impending as our war. We don’t do anything but pretend there’s something other than darkness and choices woven from the nightmare ahead of us both.
Elian takes in a breath. His hand lingers beside mine. “I had this idea that when I found the crystal, I would feel something,” he says.
“Victorious?”
“Peaceful. But we’re so close, and I feel the complete opposite. It’s like I’m dreading the moment we open that dome.”
Something shifts in my chest. Hope, maybe.
“Why?”
Elian doesn’t reply, and that’s enough of an answer. Despite everything, he doesn’t want to be responsible for destroying an entire race, no matter how evil he thinks we are. I want to tell him that I feel it too: the sense of dread mingling with the pull of duty. I want to tell him that we weren’t all born monsters.
The Second Eye of Keto could destroy either one of us, and neither of us seems to want to be the one to wield it. I toy with the idea of revealing the truth to him, like maybe it will sway him over to my side as he has seemed to sway me over to his. But it seems like more of a fairy tale than the eye ever has been, because if I tell Elian who I am, he’ll never accept it. I could promise I’ve changed. Or not changed, but changed back. To who I was and could have been if not for my mother. This humanity has transformed me in a way that is so much deeper than fins for legs and scales for skin. I’m as different on the inside now as I am on the outside. I feel the horror of what I’ve done and the overwhelming desire to begin again. To become the kind of queen I think Crestell always wanted me to be.
I turn to Elian, letting the snow wet my cheek.
“You once asked me to tell you something about the sirens you didn’t know,” I say. “There’s a legend among them that warns of what can happen if a human were to take a siren’s heart.”
“I’ve never heard it.”
“That’s because you’re not a siren.”
“Neither are you,” Elian says, matching my wry tone.
I give him a hollow smirk and continue on. “They say that if any human were to get ahold of a siren’s heart, then they would be forever immune to the effects of the song.”
Elian arches a cynical eyebrow. “Immunity from a dead siren’s song?”
“From any siren’s song.”
I don’t know why I’m telling him, save for the hope that if this war can’t end, then the least he can do is survive it. Or stand some kind of a chance.
“According to the stories,” I say, “the reason sirens dissolve so quickly into foam when they die is to prevent such a thing from happening.”
Elian considers this. “And you think that’s possible?” he asks. “If I somehow manage to cut out a siren’s heart before she melts away, then I’ll suddenly be able to face any siren without needing to worry about falling under their enchantments?”
“I suppose it won’t matter,” I tell him, “if you plan to kill them all anyway.”
Elian’s eyes lose a little light. “I think I understand why the original families didn’t use the crystal back when it was first crafted,” he says. “Genocide doesn’t seem quite right, does it? Maybe once we kill the Sea Queen, it will be enough. They might all stop. Maybe even the Princes’ Bane will stop.”
I turn back to the sky, and quietly, I ask, “Do you really believe killers can stop being killers?”
“I want to.”
His voice sounds so far from the confident prince I met all that time ago. He’s not the man who commands a ship or the boy born to command an empire. He is both and neither. He is something that exists in the in-between, where only I can see. A slip in the world where he is trapped.
The thought lights something inside of me. I steal my gaze from the stars and turn to him, my cheek damp on the snow-soaked blanket. Elian is so much like the waters he plunders. Still and peaceful on the surface, but beneath there is madness.
“What if I were to tell you a secret?” I ask.
Elian turns to me, and suddenly just looking at him hurts. A dangerous longing wells, and I dare myself to tell him over and over in my mind. Reveal the truth and see if humans are as capable of forgiveness as they are of vengeance.
“What if you were?”
“It would change how you saw me.”
Elian shrugs. “Then don’t tell me.”
I roll my eyes. “What if you need to know?”
“People don’t tell secrets because someone needs to know them. They do it because they need someone to tell.”
I swallow. My heart feels loud enough to hear. “I’ll ask you something instead, then.”
“To keep a secret?”